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Author: Alan Alpert

I was playing a bunch of different little games recently, with a common (if stretched) theme of city builders. I thought I’d give some quick reviews here to share my thoughts – they all had things to like. Giving the verdict on the same line as the title to avoid suspense, since I’m not giving detailed verdicts anyway.

With all the fuss about smart watches these days (disclaimer: I’m on my third pebble), I wanted to highlight their darker side in a short story. Ended up showing some of humanity’s darker side too, so as to not make the watches look too bad.

Last month I built a custom ping-pong paddle for my unique ambidextrous style. Since I was dealing with that sort of thing anyways, I wrote it up as an invention and so here is a full description of what I have unleashed upon the office ping-pong table.

Some more real recipes I’ve been making of late. Living in Brisbane and then San Francisco is leading to a lot of Chinese influence on my cooking; and it doesn’t hurt that I associate Asian food with healthy eating. For breakfast there’s a Congee recipe that I’m still working on, but the ones below are ready to serve!

At the start of this year I was really enjoying Heroes of the Storm, a new DotA-clone by Blizzard Entertainment. I was even going to write a review before the beta came out, but then the beta re-worked my favorite hero and I lost interest (even though he was too powerful, so he deserved it). Before I started drafting the review though, I wrote some HotS fan-fic on a flight somewhere. Mostly because of the challenge, this isn’t a deep and lore-driven world like the three it’s based on. But I overcame that, to write this backstory for the map “Dragon Shire”.

I have recently been doing a lot of Scrum process at work. Enough to make me feel entitled to critique it1. I figure that so long as we’re being assessed on our implementation of the Scrum process, I should be able to assess Scrum on its implementation of a software process. Note that I have already discussed the term “user story”. So I’m going to try something different today, and actually discuss salient conceptual points. Eventually.

A while ago I posted one version of a QML user story. But that term is quite vague, and so here’s the other ‘user story’ which came to mind. Since it uses APIs new in 5.1, it was delayed to allow those APIs to stabilize.

At Tue Apr 17 04:09:07 CEST 2012 Alan Alpert started a flamewar about QML. Whoops. But the thread did reach an appropriate conclusion as to where the rants should go; put it on an aggregated blog. Since I forgot to do that back then, here’s an expanded version of the essay now. The content is still accurate, but I’ve added two more paragraphs on the end to elucidate it further.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cross-platform QML recently, and I’m about to email the dev list with a suggestion. But the conceptual background essay is here instead of in the mail this time. Hopefully this will help better organize the information – it certainly allowed me to go into much greater depth on the wider issue 🙂 .